


Orbital Eclipse

by Chibihaku



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-05-05
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2017-11-04 21:15:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 6,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/398284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibihaku/pseuds/Chibihaku
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This isn't a love story, but it is a story about love. It's the story about all the times something almost was but never quite became it, and the one time it did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I'm really shit at summaries.

It’s not a love story, but it’s a story about love.

Those that notice know. It’s in the little things – the people she relaxes around, those few who call her by her last name rather than her rank. A rallying cry of ‘Shepard’ over the battle cry ‘Commander.’ Sometimes the people who are in her tightest circles are obvious, Kaidan, Liara, those that speak her name like it rolls off their tongue, an M’am here or there when Shepard doesn’t suffice, but hardly ever Commander. There are others, of course, those that seem to say it by surprise when caught off guard in a private conversation, saying what their heart thinks instead of what their mind insists on. Tali catches herself on occasion, and Wrex uses it as an insult.

It’s a slow progression from Commander to Shepard and most will never make the entire journey. Maybe in their hearts and minds they’ll get there, but never in their words.

With Garrus it’s a gradual slip from cause to effect. He starts off as Vakarian to her, but that falls away quickly in the wake of shared experience, barked and impatient commands turning into barked and impatient requests that he follows regardless. He finds himself at first obeying with that instinctual Turian habit, but this falls away into a mutual understanding that sees him acquiescing out of respect. She’s still Commander and he’s still Vakarian, but they’re relaxing around each other as two similar but different creatures will. Their relationship begins to form down the scope of a gun in those first few weeks.

It’s in the pull of a rifle, a shot slid home, an annoyed glance and a smug smile. A shrug in a pair of Turian shoulders and an amused widening of the mandibles as a thought flashes across his mind.

_Two can play at that game._

It’s in the careful calculations of trajectory and the feel of a trigger under a claw, lining up a perfect shot and sniping before she gets the chance to. A grunt to his left, the sound of a gun shifting, and he laughs low and quiet in the back of his throat.  She takes his next shot, and he takes the next three of hers.

They look at each other in unison, her eyebrow is lifted and he stares resolutely into those deep, unblinking blue eyes, before as one they turn and set about to business, protecting a charging Krogan who is burying himself in the enemy and throwing them about like ragdolls.

It’s in the way that the next few missions progress, as she starts to pull out the assault rifle more often, instead of ordering him to do it, the way she trusts him to cover her six as she storms the flank. She’s willing to have a pair of eyes on her back, confident they’re watching over her. It’s in a mark of trust.

Off the field they grow to understand one another. She’s Shepard, now, he’s not sure when they made that leap but he knows he can’t go back on it. There’s the conversations in the hangar, those times when he’d rather do anything but look at numbers and somehow she just knows the right moment to show herself. They trade barbs and swap skills, make bets and laugh until there’s tears running from her eyes. He drops his guard a little, lets slip some of that Turian control and she rewards him by letting him in past the automated defences, through the picture of Commander she’s overlaid on the person Shepard. Ashley’s workstation is just across the way, but the rest of the crew is a world away when they’re talking and sharing their histories. She learns about his family as she talks about hers. He memorises the way her eyes go dark when she recalls the horrors of the Blitz. They share hopes and secrets and childhoods. She gives him a window into ships charting across a star-dripped sky, he tells her of a world with glorious painted sunsets, and a place of his own underneath an old, drooping tree where time fell away.

She tells him her insecurities about Kaidan, about what it could possibly mean. He tells her that this war will have no room for ‘maybe’.

It’s in the way they come together in the mess, when she leans against Kaidan’s side, but has chosen to sit next to Garrus _as well_. It’s in conversations shared over watery rations and meat surprise (where the not-quite-a-joke is that the surprise is what sort of meat they’re _really_ eating.) It’s in the shop talk where they compare scopes and tactics, interjecting with biting humor they shoot back and forth with sniper’s accuracy.

He learns under her all the things he never knew before – that humans can be made of leather and metal, deep in their souls where no bullet can reach. He learns how she embraces fear and uses it as forward momentum, how she’s so unshakeable he thinks that nothing will break her spirit. She learns as well, learns that there’s more to him than a stereotype and an impressive father. She calls him the best friend she’s ever had and secretly he agrees for all that she’s brown and red and human.

It’s when Ilos happens. They set the course and she gives this weary sort of sigh, one that makes him stop and really look at her.  He takes stock, looks past the fact that she’s small and human, sees her for all her little idiosyncracies and for the person that she is. He doesn’t know why he does it, but he catches her arm as she turns to leave, and he holds on when she looks at him in surprise. Those blue eyes of hers are wider than he’s ever seen them.

“Shepard.” He says, awkwardly, and he’s stumbling already – unsure of how to finish, how to say out loud that she’s his best friend too, how she’s changed his life so impossibly that he thinks he can never go back to what he was before. But she’s looking at him like she sees something she’s never seen before and it makes something in him quiver as the words dry up in his throat. He swallows and a shaky “…don’t die.” Is all the conclusion he can manage.

She smiles at him.

“I hadn’t planned to.” She says, and lays one of her hands over his own before she gently pulls away. He lets her go, shuffles awkwardly on his feet and clears his throat.

“Don’t die.” Shepard echoes him, and he looks up at her, at the slightly self-mocking smile she’s got on her face, and he has a feeling that he’s somehow missed a joke.

“I hadn’t planned to.”

She lets out a little burst of laughter, and her smile when it comes is soft and secret and a little unsure. He mirrors it with his own equivalent and she turns away from him, something about her shoulders like a weight has been lifted. He watches her go, as she heads to her cabin to make her final preparations, and he returns to running numbers with a sudden agitated sigh.

When Kaidan follows her up a few hours later, Garrus quells the slightly bitter feeling in his gut and keeps his mind firmly on the mission.

It’s not a love story. It’s just a story about love.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s not a sad story, but it is a story about sadness.

It’s in the curl of a back, news delivered to behind a desk where an old best friend sits and never wants anything more than the life they had. It’s in the way a throat clenches closed, as something cold and clammy claws its way up an unsuspecting spine. It’s in the despair that grips him, deep and bitter around the heart, that squeezes him until the edges of his vision go black.  His heart stutters in his chest, he’s making a crooning noise in the back of his throat.

It’s in one word, “spaced”, and the fear left on slow simmer in the back of his mind overboils, horror settling on his shoulders.

Nothing is important anymore.

It’s a blue haze over his mind as he picks up his rifle and leaves his history behind him on a desk in a C-Sec precinct. The world is on mute, muffled sounds that might be words chasing him out of the building. He ignores them, he ignores everything but the steady hum in his temples and the rage beginning to boil in his veins.  He finds himself in the spaceport, eventually. Takes the first shuttle that comes without a consideration as to direction. He drifts alone, and quiet and doesn’t respond to questions posed.

The few others on the ship – the lost and lonely souls – are deterred by his presence. He says nothing to them, hulks in a corner of the small human vessel, and when one finally asks him what she was like (They’ve seen heartbreak in their time) he doesn’t respond.

The ship pulls in to who-knows-where with naught but a gentle bump as the gravity disengages, and they take their things out of their cabins (A sniper rifle and a suit of armor) and step off into the station where the air is as dirty as the ground. The first thing he does is anger the wrong people, those few who have power beyond the reach of a deadly asari with a temper and an intelligent mind.

His first fight is a skirmish in a back alley where he’s mobbed by three vorcha and an angry krogan. His first crewmember is the salarian he saves from them – small and quick-witted and a little out of his depth for all his finesse with a gun. Nice guy, talks too much. They never really connect.

The others come gradually, he learns their names and snippets of their past and puts them to work at cleaning out the streets. They’re dedicated, all for their own reasons, and they work hard and fast which is all he can ask. He doesn’t question their motives, learns nothing about them beyond their skills, he keeps himself distant.

He’s not Shepard.

He’s not a protector or someone who brings people together through quick words and a witty disposition. He’s not light-hearted or hopeful or ready-for-anything. The best he’s ever been was naïve and that is slowly slipping away from him down the scope of a rifle as he chips away at the cancer of Omega and never makes it better. He’s desperate, fighting a lost cause, half-dead inside and he holds himself away from his men so that they don’t ever become like him.

They are twelve and one of them is a Judas.

He thinks of a girl long dead who tied her black hair back into a bun and wonders why she ever told him that story.

It’s in the way he doesn’t see it coming when Sidonis calls him from their hole-in-the-wall on the pretense of a conversation, a _lead_ of all things. It’s in the way it doesn’t hurt as much as it should when he finds out that everyone is dead. He wonders if it’ll ever hurt again or if all the feeling has simply been sucked out of him by the black hole his own personal supernova became. He wonders if she ever knew – if he even knew that she was the bright burning pinnacle of his life, and this – this as he carves eleven names into his visor – is merely the long, exhausted end where he can’t quite fall down dead. He wonders if it’s tenacity or stupidity that keeps him fighting, even as fools stumble into his scope across a killzone bridge just twenty metres long.

It’s in the way his enemies start to learn. They notice his hesitations – the humans with red hair always live the longest, the young, female, silver skinned turians inevitably make it more than half way. Sometimes they come within spitting distance of the base before they die, because he’s tired and half-delusional and sees people in them that are so far away from this point in time as to be unreachable. It always takes him too long to realise their eyes are the wrong colour or their bodies are the wrong shape, or that Solana could never be here, now, not with Mother the way she is and Father’s overbearing protectiveness. He has to remind himself as he watches a woman with burning copper hair, and dark skin and vivid blue eyes that she’s dead, she’s dead and she’s never coming back to him.

Then the shot slides into the back of a merc’s skull, one he didn’t fire, and the two Cerberus agents are turning to cover her six. The firebrand turns, dark skin and green armor shining red in the Omega light, making her look all the more like the rising phoenix. Two mercenaries fall in front of her with perfect shots to the back of their skulls and he wonders to himself if he’s finally gone insane.

He watches her through his scope as he slides a concussive round into the chamber of his Mantis. He aims, fires at her left shoulder, and she is flung off course, lips moving in a string of swearwords as she looks up and _glares_ at him. The two humans that are with her are instantly at her flank and he can superimpose any members of her squad there, from a lumbering giant of a krogan, to a tiny, quick quarian, to a ghost. They’re already dancing about her like they’ve weathered this storm their entire lives and it is that effect, more than the way she moves, orders, storms across the battlefield as her own private hurricane that seals it for him.

It’s impossible. It’s staring him in the face.

He fears he might have died and this is just Hell catching up to him.

He watches her through the scope as she blazes bright down the bridge, hair coming untucked from behind her ears, catching at the corner of her lips, heightening the intelligence and fire in her eyes. He watches her until she slips under the opening of the building, until he can’t watch her anymore, and then he listens intently for her footfall on the tiles, smells for the faint scent of ozone wafting up the stairs. He realises that there are still mercs on the bridge that need to be stopped, and focuses on picking them off, one by one, and fighting the urge to turn and greet what just might be a phantom of his mind.

“Archangel?”

His trigger finger trembles.

So does his heart.

A luckless mercenary staggers into scope, and to distance himself from the moment, he focuses on them, lines up the kill shot and takes it. The merc falls. He lets out a long, shaky breath.

It’s in the way he takes longer than he should to take off his helmet and turn.

Her eyes widen. A subtle shaking rocks his body to the core.

“Shepard.” Garrus says. “I thought you were dead.”

It’s not a sad story, just a story about sadness.


	3. Chapter 3

It’s not a comfortable story, but it is a story about comfort.

It’s in the way he catches her when her knees buckle on Horizon. He feels her slipping down his shoulder as his arm is about her waist, all of her weight in his hands. An old lover accuses her of treason, of consorting with the enemy, and by their side Miranda stands, defending her boss but not her commander. It’s the trembling that’s running through her small frame, it’s his snarled incoherency at Kaidan’s harsh, brash “I’m done.”

He watches the man’s retreating back and it’s only because he’s still holding her up that he doesn’t let his anger get the better of him. He wants to chase after him, tear his face off, tell him just what he thinks of people who stare friends in the face and question their very existence.

She stiffens and straightens out of his hold, he lets her go without comment.

There’s a silence in the group as the Kodiak swoops down to pick them up, and a churning in his gut as he watches her face – as impassive as stone – for any sign of the thoughts that must be swarming inside her like wasps. He opens his mouth, lets it hang for a moment, then closes it again.

There’s nothing he can say.

He bristles with anger, with uncertainty, with a feeling that he can’t quite name swimming through his head as she stares at the bulkhead with eyes so far away from the moment he feels she’s lost to him entirely. He wants to reach out and touch her, but she looks like glass and porcelain, so he clenches his hands into fists in his lap instead.

On the ship, she moves silently away from him. His mouth forms around her name but he doesn’t speak it, as the ship watches in silence as she moves past. They’re all frozen in their space, unsure how to react, how to approach this all-so-human Commander.

It’s in the way Gardner intercepts him and gives him a tub of some fluffy frozen human food as he tries to make a break for the Main Battery, away from the humans and their awkward questions. It’s in the way that Chakwas spins him on his feet and gives him a helpful push in the direction of the elevator. It’s in her parting comment that the thing he’s holding (ise-ream? Aiscreme?)  isn’t as good as chocolate, but that she supposes it’ll have to do.

It’s in the way he finds himself standing outside her door, stomach in knots, how he knocks and clears his throat and the door slides back into the wall. Her room is lit blue from the fishtank, frilly little things swirling back and forth in the water, uncaring that they are the only light source in the otherwise dark room.

She’s on the bed, with her legs up under her chin and her arms wrapped around them.

She’s not supposed to be like this, he thinks. She’s supposed to be the one that holds the rest of them up, not the one who has fallen in a heap and can’t quite put herself back together. She doesn’t look up at him as he crosses the floor – she looks like she’s taken off half her armour and given up.

He didn’t know she could do that.

He doesn’t like that she has.

He sits next to her, the cold tub in his hands dripping moisture onto the fatigues he’s wearing in lieu of his armour. His cotton-clad legs look somehow wrong next to the plexiglass and Kevlar that encase her own. He reaches up to touch her shoulder and she winces away.

He curses inwardly because he forgot his hands were cold.

She shifts slightly, a little closer to him, and her legs slide out from under her chest. She looks at him, at his proffered gift and gives the slightest little laugh.

It’s in the way he can tell when she’s laughing at him, and at herself.

Her hand slips into his on the bedspread, though she doesn’t say a word. He reaches down and puts the tub on the floor, where it melts into the carpet. She sighs and leans against him, resting her head on his shoulder, and he sighs and lets go of her hand to wrap his arms about her middle.

It’s in the way they stay like that, quiet and still, as the stars roar ahead and they feel the need to say absolutely nothing.

He sticks close to her on this ship populated by spies and unknowns, settles her down when the agitation and confinement get too much. It’s the way he settles into the role of her soothing presence like she was once his, how he becomes the thing that she leans on when the galaxy becomes too much. It’s in a body language that only they understand, the middle ground meeting of human and turian expressions of trust – the smile across an empty bridge, a brush of shoulders in a hallway, his absolute lack of fear in turning his back to her (because he’s safe, so safe in the knowledge that she won’t take it for the insult it could be, but the mark of complete trust that it is). He’d wonder at it, if it had been anyone else, how much work they’ve both put into understanding the other, but it hasn’t felt like work, not really, only a slow and patient discovery of who they are.

It’s the warmth that crosses her eyes when she talks to him. Close and shy and quiet. It’s the queer feeling on slow boil in his gut.

It’s the look in her eyes when he tells her about Sidonis, like she’s going to regret the fact she’s agreeing  to help him.

It’s in the way the singing of revenge in his blood has addled his senses enough that he doesn’t care.

It’s not a comfortable story, just a story about comfort.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...pleasedon'thateme.


	4. Chapter 4

It’s not a bitter story, it's just a story about bitterness.

He hasn’t spoken to her for three days.

There’s a taste, thick and cloying, that coats the back of his throat when he thinks of the moment that she used his trust against him. It coats his tongue with the sour-nothing of ash and plastic as he thinks of (again and again and _again_ ) her head in his scope, blocking a shot that he needed more than anything to take.

And there’s nothing where the need was, not now. And somehow, that’s worse than the need, the anger and betrayal and raw, bruised honour that had pushed him to an almost animal intensity, swallowed whole by the desire of (to take and take and _take_ ) the payment that he and his men had so clearly and desperately deserved. He’s empty where rage should be, hollow where honour should guide him. He’s choking on words that don’t exist, and anger that is no longer real.

He’d built a funeral pyre of revenge, and had planned to throw Sidonis on it, but she’s taken away his torch. The pyre remains, sadness, anger and hate all twisted together like so many thorny, gnarled branches weighing down on his pride. He can’t rid himself of them, he’s tried.

Oh, how he’s tried.

When she comes to see him, he pleads work. Endless calibrations on a finicky mistress of a cannon. He pretends he doesn’t see the smallest flash of a frown cross her face, pretends he imagines the small flash of hurt resignation in her eyes. Her smile is still fond and humouring, when it comes. Part of him wishes that he could still pretend that the feelings are honest.

The next ground-side mission, she doesn’t take him with her.

The slight is sudden, but not entirely unexpected, as much as he wishes it had blindsided him. He has now avoided her for the better part of a week, and he knows that her commander sensibilities will not allow her to take a squad member with unknown variables littering their psyche. He wants to tell her he still would have her six, but he doesn’t quite know if it’s true anymore.

It’s in the way he instantly scolds himself for the thought. It’s true, it’s always true. If there’s one thing that he will always have, forever and the days beyond, it’s her six.

But she can’t trust that, and he knows that the trust is more important to her than the fact that the mission is in a mine full of sharp turns and enclosed spaces that render a sniper useless. If she’d trusted him, she would have taken him, and he can’t quell the voice in his head that whispers in a tone of spite that they’re broken and he’s broken and it’s all her fault _._ Their fault.

His fault.

It’s in the way that he _knows_ she couldn’t have ever done anything but block a bullet. It’s in the way he _knows_ she has the rock hard belief that every person can be saved, even him. He’d asked her to come anyway and with full knowledge of her uncompromising nature, her perfect integrity, her honesty and bravery that meant there was nothing she could do but stand in his scope and whisper to him all of the things that he knew he should feel. That he knew he should believe. That he did believe, because she said them. Her trust in him had never been in question.

It’s her trust in his judgement that’s been compromised.

That’s still compromised.

He remembers a salarian, anger, resignation. She’d reacted then the same way that she had now – defend, protect, honour. Don’t control other people’s actions but do, always do, shape them.

It’s in the way she hadn’t reacted when he’d demanded she move, but he knows she might have considered it if he’d asked or begged.

And how Saleon was righteous anger

And Sidonis, righteous fury.

Both were wounds to his pride.

 _Ahh._ He thinks, _There’s the rub._

(That one was Butler’s fault all over, and for the first time in a good long while, thoughts of the Black Prince and the Bard bring him neither annoyance nor pain.)

It’s in the way he knows she’ll forgive him the moment that he forgives himself.

Time passes and he shuffles, impatient, about the main battery somehow now even for all the times he’s been too busy for her, unable to be distracted by his harshest master. The thannix stays mutely insolent, he knows she’s still not firing quite right and that there’s still work to be done, but his mind can’t focus on the required maths at the moment. She only holds any equation he gives her for less than the length of a Palaven day, and somehow he can’t quite find it in himself to care at the given moment.

He paces, fidgets for Shepard to return, so that he can tell her he finally understands, that he knows why she did what she did, so he can start repairing the break between them, so he can turn his funeral pyre into a bridge across the chasm that has yawned wide between what they were and what they could be again.

And then the klaxon sounds.

Swift on it’s heels is the code for a medical emergency and his stomach settles somewhere in the vicinity of his knees before his feet are carrying him out of the battery, without his mind giving them the command. He staggers down the hall, half in a dream. Chakwas’ voice is shouting reading after reading, there is the scramble of people prepping a path, and a stretcher moves through a throng of startled crew members towards a med-bay with blacked-out windows. His heart is an icy lump in his throat, blocking off any words that he could have ever said.

Someone shouts at him through a tunnel that he needs to get out of the way, and his body moves while his mind swirls in a maelstrom of _Not again, please not again, never again. I can’t do it again, I can’t – I can’t – I wasn’t watching her six._ And all he sees is a flash of red hair and green armor before she’s gone into the med-bay and he can’t follow.

It’s in the way his hands are trembling and his throat is constricted.

He waits out each hour-long second in the mess. Someone has given him a cup of something. It’s long since gone cold.

People come and sit. Then they move and leave.

Some say words he can’t hear.

The windows of the med-bay stay dark.

The windows of the med-bay stay dark.

It’s not a bitter story, but it is a story about bitterness.


	5. Chapter 5

It’s not an awkward story, just a story about awkwardness.

She looks small and fragile against the sheets, broken and diminished, a pale imitation of the real thing. He can’t help thinking that he could break her by looking at her, with the dark shadows under her eyes, and the line of stitches standing out garishly red and puffy along the line of her throat. They are eerily similar to the curve of a human mouth, though the thing that put them there is anything but human.

Maybe it was human once, but –

He lets out a lungful of air on a sigh, to calm the staccato beating of his heart. It’s not important what tried to kill her, all that is important is that it _failed_. No matter how near a thing it was. No matter that if it had been a little higher and to the right, she would have no throat left. No matter that it was just Miranda’s fast field work that had kept her from bleeding out in minutes.

It’s in the way he has to swallow around a throat suddenly thick with emotion.  There’s a chill creeping across his hide that has nothing to do with the Normandy’s environmental systems and everything to do with how he thinks that not even this particular phoenix could rise from the ashes more than once.

There’s a hair brushing across her face, stark against the unnatural pallor of her skin. He sweeps it away, clumsy but as gentle as he can, mimicking the action he has seen her do a thousand times encounting. When it is behind her ears, he lets his hand linger there, struck suddenly by the strangeness of her in a way that hasn’t touched his thoughts since those early days on the SR1. She is impossibly small amongst the bed-sheets, skin so smooth and soft and easily broken. The danger of her is hidden behind pliant lips and eyelids just two millimetres thin. Without her fire she looks fragile, an opal without it’s hidden heart. Smooth as glass and just as easily broken.

It’s in the way he runs the pad of one thumb over her cheek in a fit of daring he would have never managed had she been awake.

Oh, but he’s in deep.

Another of the steady slew of realisations he’s had over the past night cycle, and again it is not as shocking or sudden as he thinks it should be. Only so very recently he’s promised that he has to stop lying to himself, after all.

Instead, he thinks of all the things that suddenly make sense in an _oh, that’s why that is s_ ort of way.  

It’s in the way he can’t pick the moment that it happened, but feels he doesn’t need to, not when her skin is soft under his thumb and she’s looking at him with a glazed mix of relief and fondness.

…Wait.

He jerks back like he’s been burned, her hair snagging on his claws and putting to ruin his careful ministrations of just moments before. He’s stuttering, nerves fluttering, and she’s smiling the slightly lopsided, dopey grin of someone on _excellent_ pain medication. She reaches up a hand (thankfully it’s the one without an IV line in it) and he watches, mesmerised, as she tries to take his hand. It takes her two attempts and a look of deep concentration, and in the end a little bit of help. Their fingers snarl on each other for a moment, before they find the way that makes them sit comfortably.

Any apology he could have made dies with a gurgle.

It’s in the way her hand twines over his, soft, deft fingers brushing between his own. They’re tickling and impossibly nimble and altogether rather strange in their profusion. He is still, breath caught, watching the look of hypnotised intensity that crosses her face as she focuses just beyond where their hands are.

Then her gaze swings to him and she blushes bright pink and she pulls away. She mumbles an apology and something about painkillers making her loopy and he feels his face flare into a rueful smile.

He takes pity on her, makes some sort of stupid quip, and lets his hand fall onto the bed-sheets between them. Her eyes linger on it for a moment, her hand twitches, but her expression turns inward and he watches her will cascade over her sensibilities like a wave. If not for the glazed eyes, she’d almost be Shepard proper, a Shepard who would never allow herself this, with him. He wonders briefly what she would do if _he_ took _her_ hand, then he sighs and looks away.

It would be a breach of a long established trust to take advantage of her momentary lack of mental armour.

She’d also probably kill him.

Instead, he spins her a story. He paints her a picture of an idiot CO he once had, a man who ran into trouble armed only with a pistol and a bad temper. It makes her laugh and it makes her cringe.

It makes her retaliate with her own, slightly slurred, tale. He gathers that she is talking of a dumbass rookie who was so eager to break established regulations that he ended up losing an eye and getting a medical discharge.

It’s his turn to wince and she smiles wickedly.

It’s the process of re-establishing a tumultuous and uneasy truce. Things rest between them unspoken and lingering in the air like a mild poison. The stories and one-upmanship continue on until they don’t and then he looks away, clearing his throat and glancing off to the side, the last vestiges of his stubborn pride warring with his need to apologise.

Her hand fists in the sheet, then it unclenches, smoothing the creases it created. Her nails are small, blunt things.

“I’m sorry.”

For a moment, he doesn’t know who said the words and she looks shocked and a little confused when he tilts his head slightly to look at her. It’s entirely possible they’ve spoken at the same time, equally so that neither has actually said a word at all, but her face softens and he feels his own expression settle into a wry smirk.

It’s in the way it doesn’t matter who apologised and who forgave.

She starts laughing, pitching giggles that have to hurt the way they’re pulling on her stitches, but the hiccoughing noise is so ridiculous that he can’t help but join her and they’re cackling like children, long and hard and joyous, if a little insane. A weight lifts from about his shoulders and the gaze in her eyes holds a fleeting openness that even painkillers can’t completely glaze. It’s an expression he hasn’t seen since the night before Ilos.

And that calms him and makes him lean back in his chair, cocky attitude firmly back in force as he tilts his head and spreads his legs a little and smirks. This time, when the conversation comes it borders on the ridiculous, and it’s everything that’s right about them.

It’s in the way they’ve always had a relationship ever so slightly built on one-upmanship. It’s in the tales that are never completely dishonest but are always a little too grandiose to be strictly true. High risk missions, competitions, perfect shots. It’s a combination of all three that gets his mouth moving before his mind has caught up, and he’s telling her a story about a recon scout he once knew before he can think about what he’s saying. She’s smirking, glassy-eyed and incredulous, when he stumbles to a stop, and the expression explodes into a full grin when he rubs his neck and glances at her sideways.

She looks like she could eat him alive.

He’s nearly certain he’d be okay with that.

And then he’s not sure how it happens but the conversation glides into talk of _tie-breakers_ and his heart is beating so fast it just might break, and she’s giving him a sly, lazy smirk that does strange things to his insides.

And he knows she’s probably speaking from a place that her non-medicated state would be mortified about if she were to remember and that this is probably the only time that she would ever ask him. He stutters around his conscience and asks for clarification and no, she makes it _explicitly clear_ what she means.

He’s comforted by the fact she probably won’t remember the conversation, because he can’t help but answer her honestly. Even in this he can’t lie to her. Sit on it forever, perhaps, but she’s given him an opportunity and he’s never been a good enough turian to not stoop to taking advantage.

“Yeah,” He says, willing his hands not to shake, “Why the hell not?”

His only relief is that she probably won’t remember.

Only, a week later, when he’s sure she’s forgotten entirely, a week later, when he’s next to positive that it will never come up again, she decides to pull him for a ground team to hit a merc base a system away from Omega. He’s had good reason to think she’s forgotten – they’re better and stronger in their friendship but there has been no mention made of awkward med-bay conversations – and though he has a few new fantasies that he wil never, on pain of death, mention to anyone, he’s nearly sure that the moment in the med-bay is remembered by just one person.

Only, he’s keeping a kill count and he knows she is as well by the confident, teasing quality of the digs she’s firing over the comms. Only, she’s one kill ahead of him, has been for nearly the entire skirmish and he can’t quite shake the feeling that she’s working to _keep_ it that way. There’s a krogan roar from their other team-mate, and the blast of a shotgun and a scurry as the last merc staggers out of cover, straight into his crosshairs. He smirks, sucks in a breath.

There’s a crackle over the private comm channel, and her voice is purred velvet in his ear, all dark chocolate charm with the richness of sweet cream.

“Didn’t know it actually had to be a tie-breaker, Vakarian.”

His shot goes wild.

Hers doesn’t.

She wins the count by two, and the wicked chuckle she gives races down his spine and sets his every nerve alight with anticipation.

It’s not an awkward story, but it is a story about awkwardness.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty sure the only way that this particular Shepard could have had that conversation is while on pain medication. Evey is... very Paragon.


End file.
